Author: Gunnamatta
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The ABC’s chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici.

In a fairly spectacular piece of ideological constipation the government decided late in the week to have an article pulled from public domain about corporate tax cuts and the relationship of these with wage growth.

The article – still available here – by ABC journalist Emma Alberici, which I thought well written, essentially posited that there was bugger all relationship between corporate tax cuts and wages growth. Beyond that it noted that in Australian’s case corporate taxes were not particularly onerous and that a large number of companies didn’t pay them, that corporate taxes had a marginal relationship with investment decisions, and that if Australian corporate taxes were reduced then the biggest likely beneficiaries would be large multinationals and investors in these rather than employee wages. Continue reading

There are times when one starts to assume that Bullshit, for lack of a better word, is so manifestly redolent of the Australian media world, that one forgets it is the purview of the media across the world. This week we have an absolute pearler of a reminder from one of Asia’s pre-eminent media organisations……

The South China Morning Post is a paper I have long had a lot of time for. Most weeks it has a number of genuinely good reads, and it is always insightful on how China sees and reacts to the rest of the world. But this week it has laid a solid turd on Australian-Chinese relations, and the implications of the by-election in Bennelong this weekend.

It’s another Jess Irvine piece. You won’t get it because Jess didn’t get it. She writes with all the aplomb of someone who has read about what Paul Keating said to John Laws back in the winter of 1986, but has never thought about it all that much – she sure as hell doesn’t remember it the way many people will. You come away from this 1000 words of shinola with the idea that Jess has never known debt and its impact on the national economy going bad, and probably has never been in a situation where she (or her family) owes a lot of money and is concerned about whether they will have a job in six months. If this is what Fairfax is now stooping to serving up, then I hope she doesn’t have a large mortgage – for the end may come quick.

As it makes it way gracelessly towards a post journalism future Fairfax is becoming a study in downsizing organisations, between the plethora of last comments from skilled writers who have shaped the way Australians see themselves and the world over a generation, to the desperation resonating exhortations of those still on the books as a guide to how desperate they are to remain thus.

Jess Irvine is one of the latter. She regularly tees off with incoherent economic diatribes as a sort of backfill spakfilla when Gitto or the Pascoemeter take holidays, and occasionally limbers in with some reasonably pertinent observations on social phenomena (notably housing). Sadly, todays serve is one of the former – another vacuous incoherent chunder of utter bilge revolving around the economy and labour economics, with a dash of an anti-Union slant.

I don’t have a problem with an anti-Union slant, and for a decade was an industrial relations official on the employer side for some of Australia’s larger employers – so I have seen them carry on with some weird shit. But that same experience has led me to the view that the reason for the enduring popularity of Unions in some sectors of the economy is that any given management is highly likely to be carrying on with shit which is every bit as weird, and as far as most employees of their workplaces is concerned is likely to be far more pernicious shit in terms of impacting on their conditions, incomes, and the way they do their work. In many workplaces it takes the form of a fairly vicious form of workplace politics, which can shape everything from hours worked to promotion or training opportunities, to allowances and workplace safety. Depending on the workplace it can become serious. And in many of those workplaces joining a Union makes sense as far as an address to those circumstances is concerned, and ultimately joining a Union is just another manifestation of the safety in numbers and organising in response to a threat phenomena – albeit where the threat is management.

And so we come to todays piece which ostensibly takes snippets of the Australian economy as it is, and attempts to make it stand up as an argument for more education to generate more income and then skips around aimlessly describing whatever economic thoughts have come to Jess at the time ……… Continue reading

Global oligopolists and a leading neo feudalism brand management guru have savaged the federal government’s visa changes, accusing them of being the leading edge in questioning a generations worth of Monopoly-Capitalist mantra which has paved the way to Australia’s economic malaise and suggesting that a nation with a higher foreign born population than any other in the OECD is labelling foreigners unfairly.

Coca-Cola Amatil managing director Alison Watkins, Woodside chief executive Peter Coleman and GE president Geoff Culbert described changes that will further restrict access to Australia’s visa system as hypocritical and retrograde. They also noted that all three ran businesses which focussed on minimising profits in Australia insofar as they related to taxation payments made here, were happiest when their employees in Australia were paid least, and found fresh migrants the the most committed to corporate values and behaviours while being most expendable without complaining about their minimum.

Former World Trade Organisation director Pascal Lamy lashed out at changes spurred by the global populist phenomenon.

“We have spent 35 years broadening the scope of global trade for the 1% who control more than half the world’s earnings just to extract ever more from the rest, and free trade and importing cheap labour from elsewhere has been our key leverage tool. Just because highly indebted former middle class types are upset about having their pay outcomes offshored or their services undermined by taxation avoiding multinationals, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look at the upside. Australians shouldn’t underestimate how good this is…..’ Continue reading

In the wake of the 2017 Federal Budget and with prices for Australia’s major commodity exporting slumping Gunnamatta spoke with David Llewellyn-Smith and Leith van Onselen about the Australian economy and its key drivers and outlook. In a wide ranging discussion they cover the role that immigration is currently playing in sustaining Australia’s current economic data, while making little plausible sense for a nation remaining reliant on natural resources, and how this affects Australian politics, policymaking, real estate and infrastructure.

David looks at the dynamics in the iron ore, coal and gas markets, with the implications this has for the budget, and there is a detailed look at the implications of the Adanic coal mine in Queensland and proposals to build an LNG terminal for imports. Leith explores the 2017 Budget’s reliance on wages meeting extremely optimistic forecasts, which he and David make clear are simply not going to happen, all ultimately leading to Australia expecting a sovereign downgrade, with the implications of this for the Australian economy and currency.

The discussion last approximately 75 Minutes and comes in 3 parts. Continue reading

Australia has, to put it bluntly, a public policy BDSM obsession. We like our public policy to inflict pain on ourselves and others, and when it comes to public policy failure, contemporary Australia is the definitive experience. If our government was to propose Australian citizens drop their strides and lower their buttocks over a white hot pointed steel pole, and if the media were to follow up with a vigorous discussion on the relative merits of white, red or blue hot poles, and the degree to which they should be pointy, or of the vast array of aromas searing flesh can produce, it would be perfectly in keeping with what we have.

If there was such a thing as Olympic Gold Medals for national economic self-harm then Australia would be legend. Monty Python at their most biting were nowhere near as grotesque as a nation which has (inter alia):- Continue reading

Although normally firmly against putting the contents of the Rupertarian anywhere near anyone’s mind, I find myself again in the position of needing to highlight one of Uncle’s pieces – for the purpose of highlight just how banal they can be. Continue reading

It’s been pretty hard for anyone in the wider public to think that parliamentary privilege abuse has been simply a matter of ‘just a few bad eggs’, but the revelations of the last couple of days have been staggering. We can now be 100% certain that what we thought was just a bad cold sore on the lip of Australia’s body politic is the tertiary stage of Australia’s parliamentary entitlement pox.

It doesn’t matter where you look, there is no avoiding the grotesque sense of entitlement our politicians have. Even Australia’s mainstream media have twigged to the possibility that while our politicians are sending out debt collectors on an algorithm generated witch hunt, a completely different set of rules applies to them. Continue reading

I tend to the view that Russia represents a sort of unmentionable scar – particularly for the neoliberal consensus which is currently coughing up its grip on the developed world – and a vague sense of regret, that, but for a host of decisions which seemed plausible enough at the time, the world may have a completely different Russia to engage with currently. I would also add that if you stripped that sentiment back you would come awfully close to the possibility that the Western world (and mainly the US – UK nexus) has completely fucked its handling of Russia, and the former Soviet Union, and that the chickens of that mishandling are still coming home to roost.

On the day Mikhail Gorbachev meandered off into history to leave the stage to Boris Yeltsin, the United States and the Western world had an opportunity. They could invest in ensuring that the dismantling of the Soviet Union was orderly and delivered benefits to the people of the former Soviet Union, or they could pocket the windfall of a reduced geopolitical spending requirement, and leave the peoples of the former Soviet Union to sink or swim of their own accord as they addressed the immense challenges of the end of the centrally planned era. Continue reading